Inside Urban Green

Pittsburgh » A Venerable Botanical Garden is Becoming the Greenest

Take a break and have a look at the digital age botanical treasure that Pittsburgh is building. It is a tribute to visionary leadership and looks simply fabulous. The newest green addition to the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Garden will be the Center for Sustainable Landscapes. I look forward to visiting it (on new knees) next year.

via www.youtube.com

One of the world's first living buildings is taking root on Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Garden's historic Oakland campus in Pittsburgh, PA. The Center for Sustainable Landscapes, slated to open in spring 2012, will produce all its own energy, and capture and treat all water on site, literally having as much impact on the environment as a flower. Learn more about this revolutionary project in "The Evolving Green Story of Phipps: A Living Building Takes Shape" and at www.PhippsCSL.org.

Botanical Gardens And Modernity: The Record Speaks For Itself

My contention (posted here) is that our botanical gardens, including the New York Botanical Garden, are behind the times and not fully serving the needs of city dwellers.

Following are a couple of NYBG site searches that illustrate the point. Incidentally, the same searches will produce the same results in the vast majority of botanical gardens across the country.

Garden OR gardening - Over 3,000 hits. They obviously talk about gardening at great length. However, it is only about dirt and nothing about modernity.

Self-watering OR sub-irrigation - It is rather incredible to find just one hit that was triggered by my comment on Plant Talk, the NYBG blog. Note that my comment posted over a year ago is still unanswered. The blog post was from 2008.

Hi Sonia, it’s now more than a year later. What did your experiments with EarthBoxes and other self-watering (sub-irrigation) containers reveal to you? A NYBG site search reveals no information at all about these planters.

Thanks,
Bob Hyland
 aka Greenscaper

The comment was answered privately but only in response to my follow up email to the NYBG PR person. There are at least four staff members at NYBG who read my email. Only the blogger replied with a rather wishy-washy answer.

Not only does the education program fall short but so does their professional communications. My comment should have been answered in public on the blog. It clearly deserved an answer. My advice would be to not blog if all you are going to do is duck and cover. 

It does not take a team of investigators to build the case. Google is a cold chronicler of the facts. Sub-irrigated planters (SIPs), the EarthBox for example, have gained widespread consumer acceptance with little or no help from our botanical institutions. They are essentially mute on the subject.

The public pays for and deserves better.

The Disconnect Between Botanical Gardens And The Public Need

Jonathan Alcorn for The New York Times - Laila Romero, a sous-chef, preparing appetizers at the Camellia Lounge at Descanso Gardens.

The New York Times reported this week on the steady decline in attendance at botanical gardens across the country.

It is no surprise. My regular monitoring of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the New York Botanical Garden among others shows clearly that they have lost their way. For example, instead of teaching urbanites how to grow food they waste time showing them how to cook it. We already have enough celebrity chefs doing that in other more appropriate venues.

Instead of teaching current day core subjects botanical gardens are teaching plant-growing methods from a prior rural century. They seem unaware that gardening in the dirt is not the path of modernity in the 21st century. Unfortunately, they all too often receive fawning adoration from dirt gardeners who simply don't know better.

In my view, the root cause is our horticultural education system that is badly in need of overhaul. The land grant colleges clearly need a makeover, starting with curriculum and new progressive teaching staff. It is no easy task to change the direction of this monolithic system.

Highlighting this problem is very timely. It is precisely the reason why the Center for Urban Greenscaping (CuGreen) is embarking on an education program to teach city dwellers about modern methods such as sub-irrigation systems.

The kick-off event is the free introductory seminar being held tomorrow evening at the Gowanus Studio Space in Brooklyn. It promises to be a lively and well-attended event.

More information and a seminar registration link.

via www.nytimes.com